


Jubilee

by tweedisgood



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Community: holmestice, Established Relationship, M/M, Victorian Sherlock Holmes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-30
Updated: 2013-12-30
Packaged: 2018-01-06 19:01:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1110421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tweedisgood/pseuds/tweedisgood
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Really not the person you want to come to your door when it is 1897, you are John Watson, MD and you are in bed with the world's only consulting detective</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jubilee

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Garonne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Garonne/gifts).



Stored in a certain tin dispatch box are secrets that would topple governments, ruin families, explain a dozen international mysteries and gravely embarrass a dog-catcher in Deptford. Yet there is one story that shall never find its way there. It has stayed within the confines of two skulls for twenty years, almost the whole of this present century so far, and though I write it down now – to read aloud at our hearth and remember - it belongs to us, not to the world.

The streets were still seething with human traffic all the way to Marble Arch and down Park Lane to The Mall. All of London was out of doors, that day in June in the year 1897. Garlands and bunting drooped across every balcony and shop doorway, rows of smiles in green and red, white and blue. The sun was setting at long last. Merry children shouted, fretful ones whimpered; tired parents herded them up onto omnibuses and down into to the subterranean caves of the Underground railway. A rainbow chaos of burst balloons, lost hair-ribbons and half-eaten toffee apples littered the pavements.

The great procession of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee had come and gone. Old Tom followed behind, gathering up the leavings with brush and cart just as he had even before Holmes and I had come to Baker Street. He never grew older, so far as one could tell, only ever more silent, until the day he did not come out at dusk and we knew he had no more to say to anyone.

I write remembering both great and small who are lost to us. The highest and the lowest came to our door in all weathers and all conditions of heart, and most of them left lighter in spirit than when they arrived at number two hundred and twenty-one, B.

Everyone knew where to find Mr Sherlock Holmes. I should lay short odds, nevertheless, that at that particular hour, on that particular day, they might have been surprised to find _precisely_ where he was: to whit, on the second floor, in my bed, in a state of total undress.

We had the place blissfully to ourselves: not that, had she been at home, Mrs Hudson would have dreamt of disturbing us nor even acknowledging what she undoubtedly knew what we were up to. Blindness and deafness are, contrary to first intuition, essential qualifications in a good landlady. Holmes had been hard on a case for weeks, and when he was, that was the only thing he was hard on. Success meant satisfaction in more ways than one, and around tea time a telegraph boy, working the holiday, had pushed through the press of people and delivered success in a tersely-worded telegram.

TO: Mr Sherlock Holmes, 221b Baker Street, W1

VERY WELL STOP INFORM YOUR CLIENT I SHALL SETTLE STOP NOT A WORD TO MY WIFE STOP

There is, I think, no need to grace the culprit with so much as a pseudonym. The case itself was, as Holmes put it, “worth a fee but not worth the printing ink.”

The client duly informed, Holmes’ work was done. Play could commence. I drew the blinds down on the darkening street and stripped off my own clothes. He was clean, scrubbed in our newly-installed bathroom to a pink flush over his natural pallor. I was only clean-ish, but he never minded that. His first act when I rolled against him under the sheets was always to hook his beaky nose in the crook of my good shoulder and breathe in on a shiver and out on a sigh, savouring the smell of bare skin and analysing all the little signs of my day and doings.

“Today, my dear Watson, you woke in a lather and for want of a seeing-to. We shall remedy that presently. Next you partook of Bright’s Coffee (special chicory blend, no accounting for taste) and lime marmalade on toast. Mrs Pelham has called again today whilst I was out – she of the gardenias and the cap set firmly at you – beware! Lunch was a chop and supper a ham sandwich. Bradley’s are out of your favourite cigarettes, so you smoked an inferior brand and drank superior brandy to make up for it.” He kissed me, deep and slow. “Your new toothpowder is flavoured with cinnamon. I will allow it.”

“Oh, you will, will you, tyrant?” I answered, running my hand in measured time down his belly. A groan followed it from his chest down to his loins. “Someone should teach you that he who would give orders had better learn to take them first.”

He rolled onto his back and saluted me with an insolent forefinger.

“Yours to command, my boy. Have at it!”

Straight back to ordering again. No surprise there. I covered my head with the bedclothes and took charge of what I found under them, which was a rather fine cockstand, considering the short time he’d had to grow it. I applied myself to the task of orally reducing him to abject pleading before much more time should pass.

We had just reached the part where he digs his heels into the mattress and curses in gutter French, when the front door jumped under an assault from a stick like a miniature battering ram. All usual assistance having been given the day off to join the popular celebrations, one of us would have to go down and answer it. At least, so I thought. Holmes would have none of it. He let himself slip, still stiff, from my mouth - with an Anglo-Saxon expletive this time - but tried to stop my progress out of bed, insisting:

“We’re out.”

The knocking came again: unheeding, imperious. I climbed over him.

“They will have been able to see quite well that we are not.”

“Drat. Why did the architect of this place put in so many windows facing the street? Damn twilight, damn candles, damn the Jubilee!”

Quickly, I began to dress to receive visitors, only to see Holmes streak past in his dressing gown and slippers and crouch at the lower corner of the window frame to lift the edge of the blind.

“Christ in heaven.”

He sat down with a bump. The folds of mouse-coloured silk parted around his upright prick and we both heard its summons rise clear above the murmur of good manners.

“I’ll tell them to come back in the morning,” I offered.

“You’ll do no such thing, doctor.” His face was pale as buttermilk.

“I thought you said we were out.”

“There are some visitors to whom it is utterly impossible to be ‘out’ unless one is on the other side of the earth, or under it.”

There was something very odd about his tone. The sun had quite gone down by then, and my own glance out of the window before venturing downstairs yielded nothing more than a boy in livery with a silver-topped cane – surely responsible by now for a hearty dent in Mrs Hudson’s front door – and beside him in the flare of a street lamp, the squat figure of a stout, old lady in widow’s weeds, heavily veiled in lace and leaning on a walking stick. A client, then. An inconsiderate one, at that.

I fear that my collar ends were twisted, my tie askew and I very possibly had on odd socks as I opened the door. The visitor hobbled in, took the measure of the stairs with a sigh and put out her left arm. The footman was at her side in a second but she waved him away, silently waiting for me to step up to the courtesy. Thus we made our way up to the sitting room, preceded by the footman, whose eyes were round as billiard balls as he turned at the corner of the landing and looked back to me and to the lady leaning in to me, wheezing as she reached the first floor. She was quite a weight, but it would not have been the act of a gentleman to even hint at that, nor at the cramp which was beginning in my bad leg.

Holmes had arrived before us, having lost both dressing gown and erection, wearing a velvet smoking jacket I had given him the Christmas before. He stood by the mantelpiece, plainly panting for tobacco but unable to indulge. I felt a similar, though not identical, deprivation.

“Mr Holmes. Bohemian as ever. We have often thought that a relaxation in protocol must go along with your unique habits of thinking, and you have once more proved us correct.”

My insides clenched like a mailed fist. I glanced toward the lurking livery standing by the door; he nodded once. Our exalted guest lifted her veil.

I all but fell on one knee from the shock, before I remembered a long-ago school-master’s determination that his pupils be prepared for _every_ eventuality, and made a correct, respectful bow of the head just as Holmes did the same.

“Your Majesty.”

“Dear Doctor Watson. How often at Balmoral have we read your thrilling stories aloud around the fire on a cold winter’s evening. Such a comfort to know our realm has such a clever, stout defender of the law, and a companion so loyal. The two of you set an example, throughout the Empire, of English manliness and true, loving friendship.”

I reflected that it was just as well that age had its way with the eyes as with the rest of our mortal shells, for I turned scarlet and Holmes green.

“You must forgive our intrusion into the sanctum of your home, and the fact that it must be brief. We have escaped from a tedious reception at the Palace through a side-door and will doubtless be missed before the hour is up. But on this day, since Mr Holmes has _yet again_ declined to accept public honours, we wished to specially commemorate his many services to England, and to us personally, in some other way than another trinket.”

‘Trinket’ was not quite how I should have referred to a platinum tiepin containing the most flawless emerald I had ever seen but then, one is apt to measure expectation against experience and this _was_ the owner of the Koh-i-Noor .

Her Majesty beckoned over the footman, who took from under his coat an object wrapped in plaid silk and presented it to Holmes. He is so seldom rendered speechless, save in certain intimate circumstances which it would have been extremely unwise to recall at that moment, that I went to look over his shoulder. It was a watercolour, about six inches by ten. The subject was a busy roadway under a grand arch – more than an arch, a massive gateway in red sandstone emblazoned with that year’s date and the words “Blackwall Tunnel”.

Another case which will never appear in The Strand. Without Sherlock Holmes, we might, instead of rejoicing at a Jubilee, have been mourning a Prince murdered by anarchists as he presided at the opening of that tunnel. I would not give England’s enemies encouragement by admitting in print what a very close call it was.

“Only the latest of so many acts of patriotism and chivalry. You are a knight in your heart, Mr Holmes, with the modesty that values deeds above recognition. You must forgive the hasty sketch – we were obliged to work chiefly from a photograph.”

There it was, in the corner, only visible if one looked for it.

_Victoria. 16th June, 1897_

We both stood staring, open-mouthed, until Holmes remembered his knightly duty and thanked the lady, our sovereign, with some of those potent turns of phrase which he could apparently pull out of a pocket at a moment’s notice. And I am supposed to be the wordsmith.

“We do not forget, Mr Holmes, Doctor Watson. We shall never forget. And now, we regret that our presence is required elsewhere, for duty’s sake. Good evening to you.”

When I returned to the sitting room from the front door, Holmes was in his chair, considering the painting, his lips twitching. He caught my eye and his half-smile became a grin, then a chuckle. An instant later we fell about, helpless with laughter and weak with the weight of irony, dusted with just a touch of – manly – hysteria.

We, for our part, would ever preserve in the less salubrious groves of memory the night we had hidden in one of the rooms of that same tower, keeping each other awake by telling some of the very filthiest jokes and stories we knew.

“Ha!” he cried at last, when we had nearly recovered ourselves. “I have just now remembered the ending to the tale of a waiter named Banks and a certain tongue-tripped luminary of New College, Oxford.”

I entirely failed to prevent myself from giving Holmes the perfect excuse.

“The Reverend Spooner?”

“Indeed: the queer old dean.”


End file.
